The Psychodynamics of Chaotic Work Experience

The predominant mode of experience within the chaotic group is annihilation anxiety arising from both an absence of self-differentiation and loss of self and abandonment by other members of the group or organization. Everyone has retreated or, as Horney (1950) notes, resigned by withdrawing into psychological foxholes to avoid the potential of being consumed by others and destroyed by the group for self-differentiation. Life within these psychic foxholes, however, also threatens self-annihilation as a result of feeling almost entirely disconnected from the group. Organization members are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Anxiety about membership in the group is hard to manage thereby provoking regression and the use of psychological defenses that hold the promise of helping the individual effectively cope with the anxiety. These defenses include denial and the splitting-off of experience that is associated with the oral stage of development where a hunger for relations with others (objects) is manifest. In this case, pressing personal needs for affiliation are disowned and located in others who are then experienced as possessing aggressive oral incorporative motives relative to one’s self. “Good” self-experience is retained and “bad” experience denied, split off and projected onto others, creating pathological certainty regarding their perverse motivations. This dynamic encourages organization members to see others and events in black-and-white terms that polarize thoughts and feelings thereby once again reinforcing the experience of the chaotic group as personally dangerous.

These intrapersonal, interpersonal, group and organizational dynamics contain primitive psychological defenses that may also paradoxically be observed to further accentuate the presence of anxiety relative to oneself. This outcome may include hard to know and articulate fantasies about being consumed by others to meet their needs. The presence of many denied and split-off thoughts and feelings of an aggressive oral incorporative nature makes the chaotic group one that is dangerous to try to lead, as this requires attracting attention to oneself (self-differentiation) that can promote being consumed by group members.

These perceived tendencies on the part of others are reinforced by their very real need for affiliation. They behave in a way that encourages the projection of these needs onto them. Others are then with great certainty understood to be out to use them to meet their own needs to feel better about themselves. Within a context such as this, withdrawal from interpersonal relations may seem to be the only way out. Withdrawal, however, paradoxically reinforces one’s own needs to feel connected to others while simultaneously frustrating the same need on the part of others. It is then no wonder that chaotic group experience is so threatening, self-perpetuating and unfulfilling.

In Sum

Chaotic group experience is filled with many anxiety-ridden threats to personal survival that originate from within and without. This threatening interpersonal and group landscape finds organization members steadfastly retreating from relating to each other to avoid their malevolent intentions aimed at consuming others to meet their affiliation needs (emotional cannibalism). This retreat may be thought of as employees entering organizational foxholes that provide a comforting autistic organizational artifact where a boundary can be potentially created and defended to avoid annihilation (Ogden, 1989).

The experience of chaos within groups and organizations, therefore, has a circular quality to it. On the one hand the experience promotes anxiety and regression to psychological defensiveness that, in turn, contributes to the individual withdrawal and losses of connection to others that further the sense of fragmentation and disconnectedness. Even though there is a circular reinforcing quality to this experience there inevitably develops enough anxiety that implies an underlying awareness that this cannot go on forever. Group and organizational survival will eventually be threatened. Lying within this awareness is the possibility of change to another type of group experience (see chapter 4). The direction of this change may be toward the comforting and regulated bureaucratic work experience.